devspace-plugin-loft VS jspolicy

I'm biased but I do think what you're describing is a good use case for Kubernetes. I work for Loft Labs, we're the company that created vcluster. We do have a commercial product called Loft that lets you manage vclusters and offer them self-service to developers. If you want to get more info on that, the web site is loft.sh.

There are some products available, for example Loft who open sourced vcluster

We run on EKS and use https://loft.sh/ to deploy development environments. The engineer runs the single service locally that they want to modify. Any other services or databases that service connects to run remotely in our Development EKS cluster using Loft and port forwards to the engineers local environment.

Lastly, one day my employer will let my run Loft so that I can provide on-demand ephemeral k8s clusters to my dev + test teams.

Have a look at https://github.com/loft-sh/kiosk and maybe the paid version https://loft.sh/

How many friends? I would recommend evaluating Loft which is free for up to 3 users.

Automate the setup of new k8s environments, ideally they should be ephemeral, disposed regularly and rebuilt by the devs themselves, on demand. This will also keep costs in check, devs don't work 24/7 so why should their cloud infrastructure? A tool worth checking would be Loft

Loft solves this + much more. There are cost-saving features too, so it might actually pay for itself. Don't hesitate to book a demo.

Loft.sh provides self-serve Kubernetes solutions for cost optimization, CI/CD, policy enforcement, user management, collaboration, and more. It helps save on Kubernetes costs by using quotas and space constraints which helps while sharing your clusters among multiple users and teams. Auto delete for idle namespaces and sleep mode for idle workloads also saves costs.

I struggled with understanding OPA too! I have not seen this mentioned, but one straightforward alternative is JSPolicy (https://www.jspolicy.com/), which allows you to write policies in Javascript or Typescript. It is really easy to understand and get started.

You will likely want to implement certain restrictions, limits, quotas, or security policies for your Kubernetes clusters. This could help with auditing or monitoring tasks, or with standardizing a quota for certain resources. Tools like the Open Policy Agent (OPA), jsPolicy, or Kyverno can be used based on your needs. Many developers are more comfortable with YAML or JavaScript, so Kyverno or jsPolicy might be preferred.

In 2021 we also released two new open source projects: vcluster, a tool for creating and using virtual Kubernetes clusters, and jsPolicy, a tool for writing policies for Kubernetes clusters in JavaScript or TypeScript. vcluster especially gained a lot of traction and our CEO Lukas Gentele gave a talk about it at KubeCon Los Angeles.

Either engine could be a good choice for your business. Consider which factors are most relevant to your project and your use case before you make a decision. You can learn more about jsPolicy here and about OPA here.

Loft Labs is the creator of several popular open-source projects in the cloud-native technology space, including the Kubernetes developer tool DevSpace, the certified Kubernetes distribution vcluster, and the policy engine jsPolicy. The company’s commercial product, Loft, enables any organization to scale self-service access to Kubernetes to hundreds or even thousands of engineers. Loft's customers span from fast-growing startups Gusto, Urbint, and HqO to well-established Fortune 500 companies that include one of the largest U.S. financial institutions and one of the world’s largest car manufacturers.

Loft Labs also recently released vcluster, a first-of-its-kind virtual cluster technology for Kubernetes. jsPolicy now available at www.jspolicy.com and on Github.

Would you mind explaining why is it hard for admission controllers to check container definitions of the pod? I've never used OPA or Kyverno, but I want to start contributing to a competitor project, so I am really curious to find out. Thank you! :)

This makes sense and I made the assumption that someone thought about the root-ability thing after I saw loft-sh/jspolicy.